


Abrasion

by JCutter



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Atmospheric, Bittersweet Ending, Gen, Heavy on the Metaphors, failed romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:41:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21881185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JCutter/pseuds/JCutter
Summary: See the gouges of land wrenched apart by the rolling heat beneath, leaving gaping wounds in the earth, a brackish spit of water threading through the very depths of them. We retread this conversation every year.
Relationships: Narrator/Audience
Kudos: 1





	Abrasion

**Author's Note:**

> Grammar rules are mine to use or disregard as I choose, and I am in a disregarding mood.

Look here, at this naked spread of earth in the shadow of a mountain. To the west is mud and hammered steel reaching up to the stars, and to the east is the blasted wasteland of this. See the gouges of land wrenched apart by the rolling heat beneath, leaving gaping wounds in the earth, a brackish spit of water threading at the very depths of them. We retread this conversation every year, helpless to it, dragged forward like every solstice.

These wounds _(in the earth of course, don’t look at me like that, I’m fine)_ go down and down, exposing a layered history wind-blasted by time. Storms whistle through parallel crags, blurring the lines between red and orange and black, depositing a yellow dust across it all. The wounded ochre of a healing bruise. People that love the jagged cliffs, love dusting and reading the layers, get vertigo looking straight down into the depths of this. Years roll over, winds slither through the cracks, rubbing more lines out like a sloppy child. Where is the slate eraser? No one knows, spit on your thumb and smudge it out. Pinch your fingers together, feel the chalk ground into the skin now, the scent and the dust that will follow all day. Over these parched canyons, the warm saltspray air from the west evaporates faster than the cool air, lifeblood dissipating – and by the time it reaches the crags, you might as well be wringing out a rock for water. No washing your hands of this.

It’s getting hard to remember what the cliffs looked like when they were first wrenched apart; the winds of time has taken it all. Which stone spire jutted from where? Which flint spike did you cut yourself on?

Let us talk of reliability. Our yearly parley, our solstice. Which quiet pub doesn’t matter, as long as the bartop is knife-gouged and the bartender is older than our years combined; the ceremonial grounds are flexible. In the beginning of the end, the gods demanded cheap tobacco incense, breathed by other mouths. You had quit. I was trying not to corrupt you. Now, the incense only burn out in the cold and we’d rather be warm. This is how we celebrate our midsummer _( of course midsummer; we began, leaning to the sun)_, the time of longest light, drunk on mead like our Pagan ancestors, jumping over landmine topics with clasped hands and imagined flames licking our ankles. _Let go._ We don’t need Vesta to tell us we’re doomed. There was a time we knew each painful memory like the lines of a script. _And then you say– And then I say–_ Yes, good, says the director. One more time with feeling.

We’ve both been forgetting the lyrics over the years; all we remember is feeling.

A decade of chert-dagger words, and now we fence with fistfuls of silt. Go to the bottom between the cliffs, sink your fingers in the brackish river that defines the canyon as a landmark, and silt is what you’ll find. We do it every year: ignore the storm-blasted memories over our heads, the parched and cracked soil, the heat under our feet. Get in the cool water, soaking up to our knees, and reach. There’s something here worth digging for. No diamonds in the rough, no gold flakes, nothing like a gem. Nothing the world ever recognized as beautiful, but even feldspar throws light.


End file.
